Office 11 Server Products Integration Contest

Prize

Let me first address the prize for this contents, as I'm sure a good percentage will participate only if the booty is worthy of their time: I have one MSDN Premier Subscriptions to give away... a TEAM SUITE Premier MSDN Subscription. This is the top-of-the-line MSDN Subscription that includes a copy of VS 2005 Team Suite Edition which includes all the solution architect, developer, and tester VS add-ins.

Overview

Now that I have your attention, let me digress a bit to explain my reasoning behind this content. I originally started this blog in September 2003 soon after I started with Fidelity. My first project was to use MCMS 2002 and ASP.NET to redeploy our corporate marketing site: www.fidelityinfoservices.com. Immediately after the launch in January 2004, we embarked on a company wide adoption of SharePoint (WSS & SPS). Soon, plans were in place to use SharePoint Portal Server 2003 & MCMS 2002 to redeploy our intranet site. We needed the collaboration capabilities SharePoint brings to the table, as well as the content publishing & versioning that MCMS has to offer. We elected to push forward... and a few months later, we had a single site that leveraged both SharePoint Portal Server 2003 and MCMS 2002... and the best part is the average end user can't tell when there in one or the other.

Around this time I started a 4-part series on pulling the two products together. However, in the middle of this series, I joined Angus Logan, Mei Ying Lim, Stefan Goßner, and [JoelW] as a co-author to our recently released book on Advanced MCMS Development primarily to add some CMS & SharePoint integration content along with other content. Since I was writing CMS+SPS content for the book, I didn't complete my 4-part series. However, the whole time I've been looking for people who have (or plan to) leveraged MCMS and SharePoint Products & Technologies (WSS/SPS) to provide a single solution, similar to what we did with the Fidelity intranet. At times I had a handful of people contact me asking for references of people doing similar things. Not surprisingly, it's not easy to find such solutions.

Now that we're on the cusp of Office 12 Beta 2 and the new Office Server System, we're seeing more and more posts starting back around PDC that indicate all of the Office Server products (Content Management, SharePoint, BI, Project Server, WSS, etc) are all built on a common platform (WSS) and thus, I expect we'll see many more combined solutions using two or more products in the next few years. However, I'm interested in what people have done today! What better way to stir up a conversation than with a contest.

Contest

"GET ON WITH IT, HOW DO I GET THE GOODS?"

In Office 11 today, we have three products in the Office Server System: MCMS 2002, SharePoint Products & Technologies (SPT... includes WSS & SPS), and Project Server 2003 (PS). I want to hear how you have taken two (or more) of these products and combined them to form a single solution. Maybe you haven't done it, but you've got a killer idea... I'll include those as entries as well (just because it's vaporware, doesn't mean it's not a killer idea!). How did your single solution help your business? What business problem did you solve?

I'm going to search out a few of my colleagues in the MCMS, SPT, and PS space to help evaluate the submissions, but I'll render the final decisions... once I have some recruits who are interested in reviewing submissions, I'll list them in this post (if you're interested in being a reviewer, ping me via the contact form on my blog)

Rules

There are always a few rules to any contest:

Submissions must include a ~ton~ of information: diagrams, flowcharts, screenshots/screencasts, text explaining the solution.

While you need to provide enough information to convey what you did and how you solved it, please try to limit your presentation to only require about 5-10 minutes to review.

Submissions must be sent no later than midnight EST (00:00:00a GMT -0500) February 27, 2006... send all submissions to contest@andrewconnell.com.

Provide some proof that this is your work & not someone else's.

I must be allowed to publish your solution if it's a winner or honorable mention.

However, if there is some degree of confidentiality, please note the applicable pieces... but remember, I have to have enough to show why your solution should be chosen as the winner.

I'll review and post the winner & honorable mentions no later than March 10, 2006.

If you have any questions, please feel free to add comments to this post... I'll respond to answers which may answer other peoples questions.

And since you've read this far, here's a little nugget: I ~may~ have more than one MSDN Premier Team Suite Subscription to give away for this contest... but no promises.